AI will augment people's capabilities but won't take all jobs. However, there will be socioeconomic upheaval, warns PwC's authority on AI, Anand Rao. Anand Rao is PwC global leader for artificial intelligence (AI) and is the consulting giant's innovation lead for the US analytics practice. Rao has 24 years of industry and consulting experience, helping senior executives to structure, solve and manage critical issues facing their organisations. He has worked extensively on business, technology and analytics issues across a wide range of industry sectors including financial services, healthcare, telecommunications, aerospace and defence, across US, Europe, Asia and Australia.

In many ways this year's CES looked a lot more like an autonomous-car show than a consumer electronics show. There were announcements aplenty from the likes of Ford, Baidu, Toyota, and others about self-driving vehicles, upcoming driving tests, and new partners. In a parking lot across from the Las Vegas Convention Center, several companies offered rides; you could even schedule a ride in a self-driving Lyft through the company's app and get dropped off at one of many casinos on the Strip. A couple of miles away in downtown Las Vegas, an eight-passenger autonomous shuttle bus ran in a loop around Fremont Street. It was part of an ongoing test between commuter transit company Keolis, autonomous-car maker Navya, and the city.

His proofs are ingenious, cleverly argued, quite convincing to many of his contemporaries, and utterly wrong. The Simon Newcomb Award is given annually for the silliest published argument attacking AI. Our subject may be unique in the virulence and frequency with which it is attacked, both in the popular media and among the cultured intelligentsia. Recent articles have argued that the very idea of AI reflects a cancer in the heart of our culture and have proven (yet again) that it is impossible. While many of these attacks are cited widely, most of them are ridiculous to anyone with an appropriate technical education.

Randy Davis announced the appointment of six new program managers at ARPA. He encouraged individuals to contact these managers to see where they can help. At IJCAI-95, Randall Davis assumed the office of president of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). Davis is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science and associate director of the AI Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Davis succeeds Barbara Grosz, Gordon McKay professor of computer science in the Division of Applied Sciences at Harvard University.

His proofs are ingenious, cleverly argued, quite convincing to many of his contemporaries, and utterly wrong. The Simon Newcomb Award is given annually for the silliest published argument attacking AI. Our subject may be unique in the virulence and frequency with which it is attacked, both in the popular media and among the cultured intelligentsia. Recent articles have argued that the very idea of AI reflects a cancer in the heart of our culture and have proven (yet again) that it is impossible. While many of these attacks are cited widely, most of them are ridiculous to anyone with an appropriate technical education.

The events of the Ninth AAAI Robot Competition and Exhibition, held 30 July to 3 August 2000, included the popular Hors d'Oeuvres Anyone? and Challenge events as well as a new event, Urban Search and Rescue. Here, I describe these events as well as the exhibition and the concluding workshop. This year's event brought six contest teams and nine exhibition teams from the United States and Canada. The Robot Contest and Exhibition brings together teams from universities and other laboratories to compete and demonstrate state-ofthe-art research in robotics and AI (figure 1). The contest and exhibit have several goals: (1) encourage students to enter robotics and AI fields at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, (2) increase awareness of the field, and (3) foster the sharing of research ideas and technology. The competition and exhibition is actually made up of multiple events: several contests, a challenge event, an exhibit, and a final workshop for all participants. Descriptions of previous years events can be found in Dean and Bonasso (1993); Konolige (1994); Simmons (1995); Hinkle, Kortenkamp and Miller (1996); Kortenkamp, Nourbakhsh, and Hinkle (1997); Arkin (1998); and Meeden et al. (2000). The competition this year consisted of two events: Hors d'Oeuvres, Anyone? and a new event, Urban Search and Rescue. The event stresses human-robot interaction, as well as mobility, and each contestant is required to explicitly and unambiguously demonstrate interaction with the spectators. The fourth year for this popular event, the robots are judged while they serve finger foods to attendees at the AI Festival. Unlike other contests over the years, there were no artificial walls or constraints in this event--the robots had to interact with regular conference participants, and no attempt was made to limit the number of people interacting with each robot. Robots were judged on the quality of their interactions, coverage, and ability to refill their trays (such as detecting when they needed a refill and navigating to a refill station). In January 2000, a suggestion was made to introduce a new contest, Urban Search and Rescue (USAR).

We have decided to give an award for the silliest arguments against AI published each year. The Simon Newcomb Awards, as they are called, will be announced here in the AI Magazine. Winners will be presented with a small statue (informally referred to as a'Simon') in a short ceremony at a suitable national gathering. We invite nominations for future awards. He combined a solid confidence in his own reasoning with a disdain for practical experiments. In many ways his arguments are similar to recent attacks on AI. They are short, elegant, convincing to his contemporaries, utterly wrong, and wonderfully silly, displaying an appealing mixture of partial insight with a failure to really comprehend what he was talking about. For example, there was the Stopping Problem argument. "Imagine the proud possessor of the aeroplane," suggested Newcomb sarcastically, "darting through the air at a speed of several hundred feet per second! It is the speed alone that sustains him. How is he ever going to stop?" (Newcomb, 1901). Newcomb intended his question rhetorically, but as everyone now knows, it has a perfectly good answer: "Very carefully." The Simon Newcomb Award will be given in recognition of a similarly silly published argument against AI, especially when the writer's confidence in his views seems to arise from his ignorance of the subject. The ideal candidate is an eminent scientist or scholar in some other field -- for example, a philosopher, sociologist or mathematician -- who clearly fails to grok some basic idea of computer science. While any published argument may be nominated for the prize, the committee gives highest credit to arguments which are not just idiotic, but which use some technical issue in a way that displays some, but not enough, insight. Some argument forms are already judged unacceptable, includthan they are now, or that people would be somehow reduced in status. The award is to be given for a specific argument, so that (just as with the Academy awards) a true star might receive a'Simon' for each of several outstanding performances. We also expect to award the occasional'Lifetime Achievement Award' in recognition of an entire career of silly attacks on the subject. Popular nominees (those supported by several submissions) will be announced at the same time as the Award winners. Those who are nominated but not selected for an Award may take solace in knowing that the nomination itself is a high honor. The nominees for the first Simon Newcomb Award were, Selmer Bringsjord, Harry Collins, Hubert Dreyfus, Gerald Edelman, Walter Freeman, Roger Penrose, Joseph Rychlak, John Searle, and Maurice Wilkes. In the future, only one award will normally be made each year, but for this inaugural occasion, we are proud to announce four winners, in alphabetical order.

So you can see why I feel so insulted. Here I sit, captain of enough silly proofs to take us, year by year, well into the next century, and I only win once, and only win now? Of course, our attitude may change if Jones' says, "No, you don't understand! Proponents of g are out there; and I have set myself the task of showing that they are at bottom buffoons." We would now retract our disdain for his disproof and cheer him on.

The Fourteenth International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS-04) was held in Canada in June of 2004. It covered the latest theoretical and empirical advances in planning and scheduling. The conference program consisted of tutorials, workshops, a doctoral consortium, and three days of technical paper presentations in a single plenary track, one day of which was jointly organized with the Ninth International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. ICAPS-04 also hosted the International Planning Competition, including a classical track and a newly formed probabilistic track. This report describes the conference in more detail.

The 2003 International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS-03) was held 9 to 13 June 2003 in Trento, Italy. It was chaired by Enrico Giunchiglia (University of Genova), Nicola Muscettola (NASA Ames), and Dana Nau (University of Maryland). Piergiorgio Bertoli and Marco Benedetti (both from ITC-IRST) were the local chair and the workshop-tutorial coordination chair, respectively. It is the result of merging two highly successful biennial conferences: (1) the International Conference on AI Planning and Scheduling (AIPS) and (2) the European Conference on Planning (ECP)--which alternately occurred beginning in 1991. The ICAPS-03 technical program took place from 11 to 13 June 2003.